Many consumer appliances have a navigation device, such as a mouse, touch pad or track ball, which can be used to control certain functions of the appliance. Some of these appliances also have a finger print scanner, which can be used to authorize use of the appliance. To make optimum use of the physical space that is available on some small consumer appliances that would benefit from having both a navigation device and a fingerprint sensor, it would be useful to assign the navigation function to the fingerprint sensor, and thereby consolidate the functionality into a single device.